Sunday, July 28, 2013

Using MGs for suppressing fire

Machine gun fire is one of the things that's taking me the longest to get polished. I really want it to work well. It isn't something about shooting a target to kill it, its about shooting into an area with the hopes of hitting as many targets as possible or to scare them shitless. Machine gun fire isn't very precise, but it covers a large area very quickly and helps suppress the enemy so your side can position itself better and put even more fire on the enemy.

Machine gun fire will work the following way. Your character can day down fire on an area covering 10m, 5m or 1m strips. The 10m area is a full fire action on the 10m stripe. Opponents in the area will have a high chance of being suppressed, and a quite lower chance of getting hit (depends on cover too). The 5m area seeks to concentrate fire on a much smaller area and thus increase the odds of hitting something. The odds of suppressing stay pretty much the same as with 10m, but the odds of hitting increase considerably. Finally firing controller bursts into a 1m area is meant to shoot the living hell out of somebody firing from behind a wall or other object. The idea is to kill, odds of hitting are good and odds of suppression are excellent. Nobody in their right mind is going to stick their head out when an MG is pointed straight at them.

Firing MGs also has the benefit of tracer bullets. The more your character keeps firing on the position the more modifiers the rolls will get, up to a maximum of three. For example odds of hitting something will increase about threefold from the initial trigger pull to three or four rounds of firing on the same position. Drawback is that tracers work both ways! It will expose your position to the enemy as well.

How does this differ from other games in which you open fire with an MG on an enemy position to hit a particular target? For starters you don't need to see or know where the target is. Using the mechanics you just roll for your fire and the GM rolls for whomever is in the affected area. Unless the target is very close or you have a spotter with a scope helping you, you won't know the result of the attack. Are they all dead? Hiding? Scared? You don't know. So use those precious seconds the MG is on to move your men to a better position, flank, surround and take out the enemy before they have a chance to figure out what is going on. It's all about speed and teamwork.